{"id":13701,"date":"2011-05-08T17:45:54","date_gmt":"2011-05-08T17:45:54","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mixedracestudies.org\/wordpress\/?p=13701"},"modified":"2016-06-22T02:35:37","modified_gmt":"2016-06-22T02:35:37","slug":"jamette-carnival-and-afro-caribbean-influences-on-the-work-of-jean-rhys","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/?p=13701","title":{"rendered":"Jamette Carnival and Afro-Caribbean Influences on the Work of Jean Rhys"},"content":{"rendered":"

Jamette Carnival and Afro-Caribbean Influences on the Work of Jean Rhys<\/a><\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

Anthurium: A Caribbean Studies Journal<\/a>
\nVolume 3, Issue 2<\/a> (Fall 2005)
\n22 paragraphs
\nISSN 1547-7150<\/p>\n

Cynthia Davis<\/strong><\/p>\n

Most art critics would agree that since the Universal Exhibition of 1900 in Paris, African aesthetics have profoundly influenced twentieth century sculpture and painting. Literary critics have paid less attention to ways in which West African culture and rhetorical patterns have shaped twentieth century writing. A case in point is the Dominican writer Jean Rhys<\/a> (1890-1979) who has been located within the discursive spaces of formalism and feminism and, in the case of Wide Sargasso Sea<\/a><\/em>, postcolonialism. Aside from Caribbeanists who, as Kamau Brathwaite points out in \u201cA Post-Cautionary Tale,\u201d bat Rhys back and forth as \u201cThe Helen of Our Wars,\u201d critical response to Rhys\u2019 work usually privileges its European modernism and concern with form over its Caribbean cultural context. Even though Ford Madox Ford trumpets her Antillean origin in the introduction to her first book, The Left Bank and Other Stories<\/a><\/em> (1927), critics of Rhys\u2019 first four novels rarely mention her West Indian identity. Such an oversight is puzzling, considering that every text, European setting notwithstanding, includes such identifiable Afrocentric elements as parody, satire, masquerade, hybridity, heteroglossia, and the rhetorical technique of call-and-response. Critics who do acknowledge the culture of the Black Atlantic in all of Rhys\u2019 work include Kenneth Ramchand and Elaine Savory. Ramchand contextualizes her style, \u201cessentially image and rhythm,\u201d as part of the Negritude movement<\/a> of the 1930\u2019s (Ramchand 134), while Savory contends that Rhys\u2019 texts \u201cconduct important conversations between gender, national, racial and class positions\u201d (198). Janette Martin further asserts that Afrocentric spirituality provides all of Rhys\u2019 protagonists with an \u201calternative epistemology\u201d (5), \u201cto transcend or, more important, to transgress conventional modes of knowing and behaving\u201d (4). It is surprising that even after the publication of her specifically West Indian novel, Wide Sargasso Sea<\/em> (1966), A. Alvarez hailed her as \u201cthe best living English<\/em> novelist,\u201d and Carole Angier, her British biographer, never visited Dominica as part of her research. Annette Gilson, however, maintains that Rhys\u2019 Afrocentric identity is always present in her European texts, albeit coded and manifested as presence-as-absence (654).<\/p>\n

Like Picasso and Modigliani, to whose art she alluded in her novels, Jean Rhys drew on African sources, mediated in her case through the culture of her Dominican homeland. Just as visual artists learned, from West African masks and sacred artifacts, to streamline and stylize form, so Rhys borrowed cultural and oral tropes from the Yoruba and other West African peoples. These cultural markers had crossed the Atlantic with the slave ships and evolved into the trickster tales, ghost stories, obeah spells, talismans, satirical calypso songs and carnival street performances of Dominica and the other Caribbean islands. In privileging Afro-Caribbean orality, heteroglossia, hybridity, and satire, Rhys stands as a foremother to Anglophone writers such as Olive Senior, Michelle Cliff, Rambai Espinet, Jamaica Kincaid, Pauline Melville, Velma Pollard, Erna Brodber, and Opal Palmer Adisa. Like the Martinican novelist Mayotte Capecia (Lucette Combette), Rhys writes against the racist travelogues of \u201clocal colorists\u201d like Lafcadio Hearn and subverts the stereotype of the guiablesse<\/em> (female demon) in both West Indian and European sites (Carter 446). Rhys\u2019 protagonists, like Capecia\u2019s, have been dismissed as apolitical and Eurocentric when in fact the reverse is true. Rhys\u2019 interrogation of power relations across racial, sexual and economic lines is subversive, and she approaches her subject in the indirect, elliptical style of Afrocentric social criticism.<\/p>\n

This paper contextualizes Rhys within Afro-Dominican culture and argues that the texts set in Paris and London are deeply informed by the culture, specifically by the rhetorical device of call-and-response and by the persona of the female carnival street performer, or jamette. Jamette<\/em> is Trinidadian Creole, from the French diametre<\/em>, the name given to the working class women who took part in carnival (Liverpool 3). The term is used in a broader sense here to include the transgressive, parodic style of the Dominican female street performers of Rhys\u2019 childhood. I would argue that for Rhys, the jamette signifies an opposition to the legal and cultural \u201climitations \u2026 that seek to close women and to enclose [them] \u2018safely\u2019\u201d (Fayad 451). Rhetorically, Rhys uses Afrocentric \u201cforms of verbal artistry such as calypso that require economy and highly developed verbal play [and] permit a depth of signification without many words\u201d (Savory 153). Rhys thus indirectly interrogates colonial and metropolitan power structures. In combining modernism and African aesthetics with the hybridity and heteroglossia of her own background, she shapes the satirical tone and parodic structure of her work.<\/p>\n

…Rhys\u2019 Afrocentric belief system may be grounded in her own ambiguous ethnicity. \u201cWho\u2019s white?\u201d the Rhysian father expostulates whenever the question of people\u2019s \u201ccolored blood\u201d on Dominica comes up, \u201cdamn few!\u201d (Rhys, \u201cThe Day They Burned the Books,\u201d Short Stories 156). While Rhys\u2019 father may have warned his family that the racial identity of all West Indians was suspect, he may also have encouraged his daughter to embrace her mixed heritage. Gilson writes that in the metropolis \u201cshe was subject to disparagement reserved by the English for West Indian colonials whose racial identity was suspect and whose social position was questionable at best\u201d (636). In 1959, Francis Wyndham reported on the BBC that Rhys was \u201cWelsh and Scottish.\u201d She immediately wrote: \u201cI am not a Scot at all. My father was Welsh \u2026 my mother\u2019s family was Creole \u2026As far as I know I am white but I have no country really<\/em>\u2026\u201d (Rhys, Letters 172; my italics). Her great-grandfather Lockhart had married a \u201cpretty Cuban countess \u2026 with dark curls and an intelligent face,\u201d who never fully assimilated the language and mores of the British plantocracy. Lockhart was \u201cjealous and suspicious not only of other men but of her possible attempts to get in touch with Catholicism again\u201d (Rhys, Smile Please 26). In \u201cElsa\u201d the narrator suspects that she is of mixed race: \u201cmy grandfather and his beautiful Spanish wife. Spanish. I wonder \u2026\u201d (Jean Rhys Collection [Series I, Box, 1, Folder 1a] McFarlin Library, The University of Tulsa). While one must be careful of conflating excessively, as Angier does, Rhys\u2019 fiction and her history, Aunt Hester\u2019s insinuations to Anna in Voyage that her mother is racially mixed and that her father was pressured into the marriage may be grounded in Rees Williams\u2019 family history. Rhys recalls that Aunt Clarice, the \u201creal\u201d Hester, made similar remarks. Clarice claimed that her brother was \u201ccontinually brooding over his exile in a small Caribbean island \u2026 \u2018Poor Willy,\u2019 she would say meaningfully, \u2018poor, poor Willy\u2019\u201d (Rhys, Smile Please<\/em> 55).<\/p>\n

Although Rhys was considered white in Dominica, English people, including her biographer, routinely questioned her race. Adrian Allinson, a painter for whom Rhys once modeled and on whom she in turn based Marston in \u201cTill September, Petronella,\u201d criticized her \u201cdrawling\u201d West Indian voice and suggested that she was of mixed race (Dorothy Miller Richardson Collection [Series II, Box 1, Folder 11] McFarlin Library, The University of Tulsa). Ford Madox Ford and his common-law wife Stella Bowen both claimed that Rhys was passing<\/a> for white (Angier 656), and described her as such in their books. Bowen justified her complicity in \u201cl\u2019affaire Ford\u201d by othering Rhys as \u201csavage\u201d and \u201ccannibal,\u201d while asserting her own \u201csuperior\u201d Anglo-Saxon values (Thomas 4). The sinister Lola Porter (read \u201cElla Lenglet,\u201d Rhys\u2019 name at the time) in Ford\u2019s turgid potboiler When the Wicked Man<\/em> (1931)is modeled on Rhys. Lola is a Creole from the West Indies and, like Rhys, is tall and thin. Lola has a \u201csoft, stealthy voice\u201d and \u201cgipsy blood\u201d (Ford 157). She is \u201ca seductive blackamoor\u201d(249); her breath \u201cpours in and out of her large nostrils\u201d(Ford 183). Lola frequents Harlem nightclubs, is an expert on \u201cNegro music,\u201d and tells \u201cfantastic and horrible details of obi and the voodoo practices of the coloured people of her childhood home\u201d (Ford 175). The scenes in which Lola alternates between kissing the protagonist\u2019s hands \u201ccontinuously, as if she had been a slave\u201d (162) and threatening him with death by obeah (259), are very similar to Rhys\u2019 description of Marya\u2019s behavior toward Heidler (Ford) in Quartet<\/em>. A milder version of Rhys inspires another character in Ford\u2019s novel. Henrietta Faulkner Felise is an American, of Spanish descent. Henrietta is from the \u201cDeep South\u201d (\u201cMissouri or Tennessee\u201d as Ford puts it) and has \u201ca slightly dusky accent\u201d (Ford 78). Like Rhys, Henrietta has an unusual intonation and the protagonist \u201cexperience(s) a singular revulsion \u2026 at her voice\u201d (78). Henrietta is ostensibly white but Ford makes a Carib\/cannibal association with her necklace of pink coral, her sharp little white teeth, her \u201cvery full and pouted lips,\u201d high cheek bones, and \u201cextremely large-pupilled eyes\u201d (78). Like Rhys, both Lola and Henrietta are expert horsewomen and \u201cspent their childhood on horseback\u201d(Ford 183). Lola, dressed in riding clothes, inspires lurid dominatrix fantasies in the hapless protagonist. Although Rhys and Ford both said their novels, Quartet<\/em> and When the Wicked Man<\/em>, were not autobiographical, there are remarkable similarities in the racial othering of the Lola\/Marya\/Henrietta characters…<\/p>\n

Read the entire article here<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Jamette Carnival and Afro-Caribbean Influences on the Work of Jean Rhys Anthurium: A Caribbean Studies Journal Volume 3, Issue 2 (Fall 2005) 22 paragraphs ISSN 1547-7150 Cynthia Davis Most art critics would agree that since the Universal Exhibition of 1900 in Paris, African aesthetics have profoundly influenced twentieth century sculpture and painting. Literary critics have […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1649,12,1245,21,1196,8,25],"tags":[5189,6243,3323],"class_list":["post-13701","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-anthropology","category-articles","category-biography","category-latincarib","category-literary-criticism","category-media-archive","category-women","tag-anthurium-a-caribbean-studies-journal","tag-cynthia-davis","tag-jean-rhys"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13701","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=13701"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13701\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":47877,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13701\/revisions\/47877"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=13701"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=13701"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=13701"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}